I had no idea there’d ever been a horse in the pasture but, by the time I learned one was supposed to be, he’d gotten out and I had to get him back.
The Old Man had kept dairy cattle on his place for decades before I came along. Although he’d closed the operation during my early years, his fences were all still in good shape.
With no cattle or other big critters around to lean on them and no trespassers coming by to pry them apart, there’s not much to go wrong with steel barbed wire, strung tractor-pull tight and tacked staple-flush to heavy creosote posts.
The back pasture covered several acres of brush and planted pine, had a few rolling dips and three good ponds. To my knowledge, nothing bigger than a rabbit, a quail or a catfish was living there, nor was any supposed to be. I’d gone in to fish one of the ponds, leaving the gate open along the way. When I came back out, my grandmother informed me the neighbor’s horse had escaped.
“They’ll sue us, for sure,” she said, and went off to call the Old Man at work to break news of the calamity. Above all else, from bad weather to ill health to unforeseeable death from above, she was haunted by an abiding fear of lawsuits.
I looked about in all directions before finally spotting the backside of a large, brown horse, three hundred yards away and still retreating at a jaunty clip, and I set off after him, empty handed and with no idea of what to do next. At the time, the total of my horsemanship skills and equine experience came to a grand sum of zero, but I knew I had to beat the imagined flock of lawyers to the scene, whatever else happened.
In the Westerns I watched on TV, cowboys lassoed the ponies they wanted to catch, or else headed off their stampede with a few well-timed shots from a revolver, but I was both ropeless and unarmed.
To my surprise, and presumably the horse’s as well, I soon caught up with him when he went down a road with a deep ditch on either side and a field gate across the end. I knew I had him bottled up, but that was all I had. No one seemed to be at home on either side of the road. The horse wasn’t wearing any sort of tack at all, I didn’t think he’d let me lead him back up the hill by voice alone, and I sure wasn’t about to try to mount up and ride. The horse was having a fine time, but I was afraid of the neighbor, lawsuits, the horse, grandmother and the Old Man, not necessarily in that order.
That was where we stood, and where we were standing when the Old Man drove up and took over. He produced a six-foot section of bright yellow plastic from the floorboard of his truck. It wasn’t a fine lariat woven of top-quality hemp for the purpose, but a salvaged, crooked scrap of twine from a shipment of goods. He tied a small knot in one end, then made a few loops between his fingers and turned a kind of cat’s cradle with his hands.
Like a stage magician without the “Taa! Daa!,” from the twine alone he conjured a bridle complete with bit and reins. This he fitted over the horse’s head without protest from the latter. He pulled one part tight, and instantly the twine looked like it had never known another use. Then he handed the loose end of the operation to me and drove off, all without saying a word. I led the horse down the road and back up to the pasture without further incident. Both he and I were in awe of what we’d seen.
The Old Man was holding the gate open when the horse and I arrived. There the horse took the lead and, as he passed through the gap, the Old Man pulled at a part of the rope contraption I couldn’t see and it dissolved back into a length of plastic scrap.
“Have I told you before to close gates you find closed and leave open gates you find open?” he asked.
“No sir.”
“Well,” he said, “now I have.”
He never had to tell me again.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 47 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
